


Play Football for the Coach

by bunnoculars



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-13 05:23:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13563771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnoculars/pseuds/bunnoculars
Summary: After a bad hunt, John ditches Dean and Sam in small town America. Dean tries to cope.





	Play Football for the Coach

**Author's Note:**

> Random Supernatural fic. I stopped watching the show around Season 6, kind of wish I'd stopped at Season 3, but there's just something about Sam and Dean. idk, this is basically 20000 words of teenage Dean being depressed and bored.
> 
> Title is cribbed from Lou Reed's "Coney Island Baby," which I've always seen as an ode to normality as the unattainable, from someone who's on the outside looking in. So nope, this fic has nothing to do with football.

Dean did not want to go to school.

His father was pretty clearly indifferent to that fact, hunched impressively over the steering wheel, gnawing his thumb with his eyes burning in his head. Dean knew that look, had memorized it in snatches over years in the shotgun seat. In his short life he had learned to take pleasure in the small things to dull the edge—eating up blacktop at 90 miles an hour with the radio blasting, pretty waitresses and a steady diet of Reese’s and peanut M&M’s. Dad, though, he kept himself sharp. Every passing moment was a vigil.

“You got something to say, son, just say it.”

Dean’s eyes skidded over the stony turn of Dad’s head and his chest seized up weirdly, suddenly skittish and found out. He jerked his head down, caught a flash of Sam in the rearview mirror, scowling and slumped against the door.

“No, sir,” he said. His mouth tasted like ash.

The world unspooled at forty miles an hour outside his window, early September morning greyer than it had any right to be, gutters trashed with sodden debris and dirty colored clapboard houses hunched along the curb. Tired little nothing town, nothing to set it apart from every other cluster of lights off the highway they’d passed by to get here. Bumfuck, Virginia, point of fact, nestled under the Blue Ridge, outer reaches of Appalachia. 

When they pulled up it turned out the school was the same school they’d attended a hundred different times, too, shabby, low-slung fortress of red brick, and at the sight of it his stomach clenched, already curled into a hollow leaden fist since breakfast fifty miles back. Their father liked his coffee black, took it as a measure of his sons’ manhood that they follow suit, but Dean had figured Sammy was a lost cause anyway, so he’d bought him orange juice and a pack of fig newtons, spent the change on two of the largest cups of truck stop coffee man could buy. 

He’d known he’d be sweating it about now, and sure enough, the caffeine was crawling sickly under his skin, and acid climbed up his throat as Dad and Sam went through the motions in fast-forward, both of them too stubborn to say much. This particular scene had gotten shorter every time they reenacted it, whittled down to a couple inexpressive grunts since Sam had turned thirteen.

The slam of Sam’s door kicked him into a desperate kind of awareness that he was on borrowed time.

“Just, uh.” He was having trouble looking at him. “Take care of yourself, all right?”

“You just worry about your brother,” Dad said, the barest hint of gentleness laced into the iron in his words, and Dean’s chin snapped up. He could do this part. “Figure the cash should last you a month, but if you run out, get a job. Don’t try anything dumb, you hear?”

Dean tried like hell not to take that badly. He honed his indignation to give his father a look that protested _Who? Me?_ and said, “Maybe you could try having a little faith in me,” just to hear him chuckle, dry and raspy like he was out of practice, but he was careless and the bitter cast of his face betrayed him. He hated himself for the weariness creeping into the line of Dad’s mouth, crease of his brow, pushed past the feeling blindly. “So you think we’ll be here a while.”

It was pretty easy, too, to hate himself for how much that sounded like an honest-to-god question, when his father sighed, and for how much he didn’t want to hear the answer, as long as he was going down that road. He bit his tongue till he tasted blood.

“We talked about this, Dean,” Dad said, already a hundred miles away. “Best case is a week or two, but don’t bet on it. Lead’s a couple days old and you know how hard these suckers are to pin down. Once I got more to go on I’ll get in touch. In the meantime, you know what to do.”

Sam was waiting for him impatiently, skin and bones and hunched miserably in on himself, his too-long hair hiding his eyes. He’d shot up a solid foot in the last three months and maybe lost weight, now level with Dean’s chin and constantly on the edge of starvation. 

With the roar of the Impala dying in his ears, Dean strode up and hooked an arm around his brother’s head just to hear his strangled squawk, but somehow he still wasn’t expecting the rough shove in his side and muffled curses that had greeted him since Sam hit puberty.

“Butterflies, Sammy?” Dean said, grinning down at him, and once again he was caught wrong-footed.

“It’s Sam, Dean. I’m not fucking ten anymore.” There was a long pause and Dean thought that if Sam was dropping f-bombs he was probably done with him, until he stopped short in front of the pearly glass doors, pinned him with accusing eyes. “He say how long he’s leaving us here? I need some kind of timeline to know how much of a shit I’m supposed to give.”

“Don’t seize the day too hard there, Samuel, you might pull something.” He felt real satisfaction when Sam’s eyes flashed and his mouth tightened compulsively, before the moment passed and he felt pretty bad about it. “A couple of weeks if everything goes right, longer if it don’t. He’ll be back when he can, and you know that.”

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say because Sam wrenched at the door angrily, his plans to storm off in dramatic fashion only aborted by the ungodly early hour and the deadbolt locking them out. Dean half wanted to laugh at him, half wanted to pick the lock, but he knew that wouldn’t solve anything. A glance at his watch destroyed his willpower and he crumpled like his strings were cut, glass a cool slide along his back and the cement under his ass still moon-kissed and damp. Humidity clogged his lungs, but it was still hard to believe how hot it was going to be in a few hours. Six o’clock, two hours before he could even begin getting this over with; six o’clock and he’d been up for thirty-one hours by his count, began this day bloody, in the backwoods of Minnesota. Sam didn’t ask what time it was, probably because he had a better concept of that kind of thing than Dean, set more store by it. He probably knew the date, too. 

For a long stretch of time the world order was upended because Dean was gazing up at his little brother, who was ill tempered and ignoring him in favor of glaring helplessly at his own reflection. The silence killed him by degrees, and he probably deserved it. 

“Come on, man,” Dean said at last. “He’ll be fine, he always is.” 

“Sure, Dean,” Sam replied tonelessly.

“Just a couple weeks. A couple weeks and we’re out.”

“Yeah, because that’s my issue here. If,” and he chickened out when he saw Dean’s face, “When he comes back, and it starts all over again, what exactly is that supposed to change?”

He wasn’t trying too hard to disguise the corrosive edge to his voice, anymore.

“Don’t start on me, Sam, not now,” he began, but it was a terrible idea to open his mouth, his voice barbed wire scraping up his throat. He took a moment, world bleached shockingly white against the pressure of his fists. Didn’t know whether to tell Sam it had been a one long motherfucker of a day or that it was too early for this shit.

“I’m not _starting_ anything,” Sam half-shouted, and Dean couldn’t have baited him better if he’d tried. Stupid, stupid. “Sorry if I’m inconveniencing you by wanting a say in my own fucking life.”

Dean was a good ways to desperate at how badly this was going. A year or two ago and he could have played Sam like a fiddle, knew to a freakish level of specificity how to get the reaction he wanted; most of the time he still could, but then there were moments like this, where every weapon he had against him backfired or was worse than useless. 

Sleeplessness gnawed at his bones, while the coffee wrecked his nervous system, hectic surges of energy he didn’t know what to do with. All he knew was that he hated the rigid line of Sam’s back, the tense unhappy hook of his shoulders when Dean kicked at his shoe. 

“Look,” he said finally. “I know things aren’t perfect—” Sam snorted but he could work with that, because it meant he was listening, “Okay, pretty fucking far from it, and, and this place sucks as much as the last one did and the next one will, I know that. But I just, I wish you wouldn’t let it get to you so much, Sammy.”

Dean leaned back and rested his eyes through the short silence it took Sam to digest this. He knew it was over before it really began when he felt the weight of Sam’s gaze on his upturned face and Sam was saying, almost fondly in spite of himself, “You’re so full of shit, Dean. You saying it doesn’t get to you?”

“Nothing gets to me, bitch,” Dean retorted by rote, glancing up to find Sam considering him with a stranger’s eyes. Dean allowed him for a few seconds before he gave him a smile that was mostly real and said with all the wisdom of his years, “I tell you what, though, it ain’t all bad.”

Sam’s expression flickered in annoyance, giving him that look that told him plainly he was too stupid to live, but he was past caring, because over his shoulder a bald, hunched guy, janitor of some stripe, was getting out of his car, hobbling towards them, no doubt pissed off he had to deal with kids so early. He was the best thing Dean had seen all day.

 

His father had thrown himself into this new hunt maybe half a day after they hit civilization again, latched onto one of a dozen voicemails backlogged on his pager (Dean kept bugging him to get a cell phone without much hope, new-fangled tech for a man who couldn’t work a microwave). He drove east like a man possessed. He’d been burning from the inside out, his black silences crushing Dean’s ribs into his heart and the planes and angles of his face carved into a moonscape, strange and paralyzingly unknowable. Sam was furious with Dean, too, when they swung by to pick him up from Bobby’s, but for entirely different things Dean could understand. Just petty teenage stuff, nothing he couldn’t deal with. Hours and hours on the road, maintaining a merciless salvo of name-calling, and the storm brewing in Sam defused into offense at Dean’s general existence, nothing new.

Turned out a hunting buddy of Dad’s had had a run in with a phantom hitchhiker, bad son of a bitch that had left a thirty-year-long trail of bodies up and down I-81. The guy—Marv—had been pulled from his wrecked car fifty miles from anywhere by an off-duty EMT who’d witnessed the accident, just happened to be driving back home from her sister’s place up in Alexandria, had work in the morning. That kind of once-in-a-century luck where Dean couldn’t help but laugh and laugh. He’d fought for his life and survived, no small miracle in itself, but then the medical system had sunk its teeth into him. Turned out his case was too complicated for the backwoods hospital where he’d fetched up, so now he was stuck waiting out the transfer, shitting into a bag, metal rigging holding his body together. He had a semi-permanent set-up down near Lynchburg with a couple plants that needed watering and a cat named Middy he was particularly anxious for.

The damn thing was a deranged old fleabag so of course Dean ended up taking care of it. Sam had fantasized about pet ownership going back to the second grade, when he’d encountered a litter of puppies at one of his little friends’ houses, but he’d balked when his first real chance at it took such a perverse form. Then he’d sulked until he realized how hilarious it was to watch Dean scoop litter and endure her abuse while he served up slimy, dubiously gourmet entrees by the canful. He liked to think he would’ve let her starve, in a world where this house weren’t stocked with enough cat care products to last a nuclear holocaust, and he hadn’t seen this dude’s eminently respectable gun collection.

By his reckoning housesitting wasn’t too far off from extended stay America, shared that constant itch of paranoia, the ethos of leaving no trace of himself behind. It was a generically American house, clapboard two story the color of cloudy water, nothing about it giving away the fact that its owner hunted demons in the night and knew things that would make him a madman in every other house like it. Never was. 

Dean had been raised on the road, his entire world contained in shitty motel rooms and the leather interior of the Impala and the never-ending horizon out her windshield, and this kind of space nailed down in one place felt like a trap, such an unaccountable luxury he could never see the sense in it. Half the inside was torn up, a renovation project with years of failed ambition played out in the plastic stapled up over doorways, walls that were an uncertain patchwork of pink insulation and sheetrock slabs, and the carpets grown ratty and ancient with a thick layer of dust and debris. 

Sam’s room was one of the few to have survived untouched and Dean didn’t like to think about why. The bed was made up in Chips Ahoy sheets, and in the closet they discovered a box filled with G.I. Joe figurines and an encyclopedic collection of dinosaur magazines that proved too great a temptation, its glory faded and dog-eared but no lesser for it.

“Giant lizards, dude,” he said happily in response to Sam’s raised eyebrows.

“Yeah, about that,” Sam said, mouth crimping into a small smug smile. “They’re closer to birds than reptiles, which you’d know if you could actually read.”

But Sam wasn’t going to ruin such an insurmountable example of awesomeness for him. It was impossible to argue against the illustrations, anyway, an irresistibly gory display of sharp teeth and huge claws put to good use.

He flicked to a page with a brontosaurus and whistled, nudging Sam. Said innocently enough, “Imagine hunting that son of a bitch,” just to see the sheer brute force of annoyance blast that superior look off his face. 

“Oh my god, they’re herbivores, Dean! They’d be a threat to trees and literally nothing else.”

It was less fun when Dean found a photo of what must have been Marv and his little boy in the ruin of the master bedroom, both of them freckly faced and smiling, squinting into the sun. Going in there already bought him a steep decline into morbidity, but after that Dean dropped all pretenses and made the downstairs his own, bedded down on the creaky old couch that made a set with the armchair erupting stuffing in front of the television.

When the sun went down, the shadows lengthened, swallowing up whole rooms and creeping up the stairs until the house was lost to him. Every night was another twelve hours of crap TV turned down low so Sammy could get his beauty rest, coffee burning up his gut and caffeine fueled paranoia lighting up his nerve ends, walking a beat around the salt lines like clockwork, with his Berretta dangling between nerveless fingers and the cat padding behind him. By the first midnight it was brainless, rote, and by the fifth or sixth he’d worn a track in the carpet the daylight could trace. One night he found Spinal Tap in time for the drummer to combust, and he had a couple of lucky streaks—M*A*S*H reruns, all night Simpsons marathons, a spiraling, deadly secret love affair with Bob Ross—but for the most part there was nothing on that could keep him in that chair more than fifteen minutes at a time.

 

Dean’s list of priorities was brutish and short wherever he went (began and ended with Sam), but in the weeks before he’d stopped being a person, his whole world narrowed down to the woods, his father, and the wendigo that was rumored on the wind. A day and night in the car, one hundred miles an hour and maybe fast and far enough away to get a good angle of reentry, Sam’s wide eyes down in South Dakota before Bobby turned the hose on Dean, yellow moon over Indiana and daybreak in the mountains chasing away his last few hiding places, and here he was. Delivered.

The first couple days at school were like staring down a chain of headlights late at night, that hypnotic kind of tunnel vision that detonated into technicolor cryptograms when you tried to look away. His grip on events was false and brittle, and his autopilot would sputter and die on him where time grew syrupy, stretched inconstantly between the things he was supposed to do, places he was supposed to be. Class wired him wrong, made him dumb on a fundamental level, like it wasn’t there for him to understand, and there was nothing anywhere for him to hold onto that made any of it seem real, nothing to believe in and nothing to kill. The shrill of the bell and crush into the hallway turned him into someone else.

It was easier at home. And when Dean blacked out in Wednesday morning English class, a miraculous hour and a half before the teacher’s gentle hand shook him awake in an empty room, the whole thing got easier. Nothing he hadn’t done before.

Senior year in a class of one hundred fifty was an obsessive, incestuous cult of nostalgia among people who were trying to get along again with the idea in mind that they’d never have to see each other after graduation. Dean stuck out like a sore thumb, the first whiff of fresh meat since God knew when, but he was okay with that. He kept his distance from all that Stepford crap and let the girls come to him.

Dean himself had been to so many schools they were reduced to incidental memories cluttered around things he and his father had killed, milestones in Sammy’s life, his own sexual history. He’d have dropped out last year in a heartbeat, earned some real money around the edges until Sam was old enough, but it would’ve taken some doing to win over Dad, what with his gut instinct to never let Dean get out of anything, fatally combined with an absurdly uncharacteristic belief in public education. In the meantime his patchwork of failed classes, disciplinary problems and mysterious absences had gotten him to his final year on schedule. Apparently they let just about anybody in, a notion that snowballed into unshakable conviction after five minutes with the kids in his physics class.

His lab partner might have been involved in that judgment, but she was so cute she got a pass. She had a summer tan, sugar spun smile, and long corn silk hair, and her body held enough possibilities that Dean pretty much gave up on physics right then. She’d told him her name was Emily, that she’d never been to wherever he’d decided he was from that day, and that she was sorry because science wasn’t really her thing, and when Dean had idly asked what her thing was, not meaning anything creepy by it, she’d told him she had a boyfriend. 

Dean tried to respect her space after that, he really did, focused his attention elsewhere (Melissa the cheerleader was a sure thing, getting surer all the time), but after a lifetime of hitting on girls and not much else to do with them, he wasn’t sure how to turn it off. For a while everything out of his mouth made her blush self-consciously, like she wasn’t sure how to let him down easy, but when things settled down between them and they were left trying to navigate their collective incomprehension, somehow greater than the sum of its parts, and Dean spent long stretches betting Sam could probably do this shit in his sleep, could probably graduate high school right out of eighth grade and what a neat trick that’d be, he genuinely started to like her.

Emily was one bright spot.

 

They’d been broke when he and his dad took to the wilderness, and now they were running on fumes. Dad left Dean in Virginia with a chunk of their emergency funds and took to the road with their last working credit card. They lived on Kraft and ramen and peanut butter sandwiches, procured form the convenience store a couple miles away. Even if Dean had the money or inclination to cook Marv’s kitchen would have put him off, stove tacky with a thick layer of residual food, month-old dishes in the sink and ancient leftovers moldering in the fridge.

And it was a pain getting around. The only vehicle left to Marv was an eyesore of a minivan rusting in the garage, a red 1986 Ford Aerostar. He’d probably kept it around to ferry things to and from the lumberyard and the dump. An old clawfoot bathtub had summered inside it. It might have weighed 300 pounds and seemed destined for the upstairs bathroom, which went a long way to explaining why it was in there instead, but Dean took it as a sign from above that his soul be spared driving such an abomination, and let it be.

He lasted about a week, a week of the world moving so slow and silent and unchanging it made him dizzy, an unfamiliar creeping powerlessness that came with feeling his age for the first time in a long time. A week of scanning the evening news for car crashes along the interstate, never for his father and the Impala, never, while Sam was shut up with his homework upstairs. A week for his body to forget where it had been, and then he came home to a message from his father on the landline, telling him he had tracked the spirit down to the end of the line in Tennessee, was still putting the pattern together because Marv’s legwork was proving to be pretty sloppy. The majority of the time with these cases there wasn’t even a body to salt and burn, a person that would be missed or remembered, just nameless highway trash, and a lot of hunters would leave it there because they weren’t soldiers, were just looking for something bad to kill. Not Dad. He read purpose and desire into a spirit’s movements like the back of his hand.

Anyway, the thing only came with the rain and the radars were clear across the board into next week, so he had a window. 

At that frustration rose up in Dean so sudden he was sick with it, dimly aware his hands were shaking as he choked back the thick scrum of bad thoughts threatening to black everything else out. _At least Marv moved on the fucking thing_ , he wanted to scream; it blistered up his throat like hellfire but the next moment it went up in smoke and the bottom dropped out of his stomach because that was the kind of thinking that got men killed. Kind of thinking that landed you in the hospital with your spine cracked in three places and your insides reduced to jello. But his father wasn’t Marv. This house, filled with memories and signs of use, proved to Dean every day that this guy was softer than the man who had raised him could ever be again. He didn’t need Dean to watch his back, didn’t need anybody, Dean knew that sure as breathing, but goddamn if it wasn’t hard to believe in this dingy little kitchen hundreds of miles away from him, afternoon sunlight drifting in through the open window and splotches of pen ink marking up his hands instead of dirt and blood.

Sam was at cross country practice, probably the fifth team he’d been on in the last two years, and he wasn’t going to be back till six, so Dean let himself listen a couple more times. When his hands were steady and his breathing evened out he went out to the garage and all but killed himself dragging the tub out. He left it with its legs sticking in the air in the spot where Marv’s car would have been. Then he took the van out a ways, felt the wind in his face for the first time in days and shot a couple rounds into the side of an abandoned old barn, wildflowers and sunlight and the smell of summer, dreaming of the Impala on and off, in the future where she would be his.

 

Sam was glad to have the car operational in such an uncomplicated way that suspicion prickled at Dean. Maybe he hoped that Dean wouldn’t guard it so jealously, might even let him have a shot at driving, but he and the Aerostar had developed an understanding, not a suicide pact. Sure, he had learned ten years ago, his father bleeding out next to him, biting off instructions he couldn’t hear over Sammy’s howling, but it had taken an apocalyptic kind of faith that somehow didn’t translate into Sam behind the wheel of a minivan in broad daylight.

Sam wasn’t so hard to understand the next morning when they slid into the car and drove the five miles to school, and got there before the first bus showed up. It was a set up to buy Sam half an hour or more of sleep, the perfect practical argument against Dean hauling his ass out of bed before dawn every morning. Frankly Dean wasn’t sure he could take that deal, more of his dead early morning purgatory over the long shadow of the school day, but that was something Sam was never going to know.

It was a small difference that cost Dean the few indeterminate hours this thing called real life couldn’t touch. Their runs took them past the town limits and into the countryside, where they would spar gracelessly in the first light and the red Virginia dirt, but Sam changed after sunup. He was joyless and intent where he’d been clumsy, Dean’s whiny kid brother sleepwalking through their father’s war. It took too little for the air to grow still and close these days, and the way Sam came at him now, like he really wanted to hurt him, the way Dean forgot himself in those moments, that was new. 

 

They needed the money and Dean needed to waste time, so he got a job and worked afternoons and evenings on weeknights. Hamburgers were among his top five favorite things on the planet, somewhere behind Dad and Sam and the Impala, but goddamn if he didn’t feel like a soulless cliché flipping burgers at the local drive in. It was known as John’s, a name that was ironic to Dean only, aiming for a laconic, homey charm its industrial white tiled interior failed to reflect. It paid weekly and promised to feed him.

He knew most of the teenage grunts by sight, and they integrated him into their operation with brutal efficiency. The manager was a wiry nervous woman in her late twenties, name of Amanda. She was a hardened skeptic of the official version of things and had a terrifying command of workplace gossip; by her account, Bill and Hillary had left a body count of no less than six back in Arkansas, and their dead-eyed, gum-snapping coworker Erica had found it within herself to fuck half the football team last year. After he’d been there a couple of days, long enough for the free corndogs to lose their novelty and the sallow light to wear him thin, she got so bored with it all she let him fuck her out back by the dumpsters. The glow faded in twenty minutes and Dean was old news. That stung, kind of an epic blow to his ego, but nothing ever changed anything in that fucking place except the clock.

He saw the rest of his peers lined up at the counter every night, restless small town kids looking for something they’d never find their whole lives. He’d found it well outside this twenty-four hour halo of grease and salt, out in the darkness with blood drying on his face, sick inhuman smell of burning flesh and sparks dancing in the dark, thousand stars all around, Sammy waiting in the car and his father’s shoulder solid and warm against his. Sometimes he’d be deciphering transmissions from the cracked drive thru speakers or waiting out rounds of value menu bingo or wishing Erica had been the type to play with her food, and it would hit him all over again, the thin line between the hunt and here.

Sam told him he smelled like he’d gone swimming in the deep fryer, and it was true, the scent submerged into his clothes like some deep cover camouflage (which, okay, smelling like a cheeseburger wasn’t the worst thing). He took the spoils of Dean’s labor happily enough, though, because Sam was never going to turn down free food.

Over night he became The John’s Guy at school, like this single identifying factor placed him in their web. It had happened to him once or twice when Sammy was little and he wasn’t good for much yet himself—he’d been the boy who’d stabbed another kid with a pen one winter in fourth grade, and the fuck-up who got caught shoplifting for three whole months in sixth—but for most of his life he was back on the road before people could pin him down, decide who he was and how he fit into things, and he preferred it that way.

 

He always got a seat along the windows if he could help it, and he usually could. He’d confided in the girl who used to sit here that he was having trouble staying awake and kinda needed to pass economics to graduate, and she’d thought that the sun in his face would help. Normally it wouldn’t have been far from the truth.

Most days he was blinded, lurid holes eaten in his vision when he switched from the burnished green grass below to the surgical white slash of the teacher against the chalkboard. This time was different. The sky was bruised and mean-looking outside, kind of sky that cast its shadow over the whole world. Dean hadn’t dreamed in ten days, was going on three without sleep, and when the first few raindrops splattered against the glass they seemed unreal, crystalline veins of water untouched by the dirty grey edge of exhaustion.

Discontent made itself known in a vague, abortive ripple across the classroom, but these people could take one shitty, soggy ruin of an afternoon and why not. The sun would come out tomorrow and the next day. Maybe in a couple hours. Weather channel told Dean this morning that it would start at two, drizzle here and there, maybe thunder over night as the front passed through. Tennessee was going to get hammered in the meantime, on and off till dawn.

He wasn’t built to care about surpluses and deficits under the best circumstances, and neither were rest of them, kids who were theoretically supposed to be. It had been a source of amusement over the years and schools and grades to think the system just produced more fuck-ups like him, but now the idea was a rock in the pit of his stomach, because there was no way he could see that he didn’t fit into this particular day in the life of the average American teenager, nothing that saved him from being the pimple-faced guy slumped and drooling over his notebook next to him, the curly-haired girl who turned red when he caught her staring straight through him, the chair in front of him that had been empty for all three weeks Dean had been there. The bottom line could simply be that boredom was an absolute, and time was better wasted than spent learning the sixty thousand different rules that came with the social contract. Where Dean came from that level of indifference was a death wish, but what did he know. Straight world seemed pretty goddamn forgiving.

Some poor sap got called up to the board to illustrate the concept by adding and subtracting imaginary sums of money. He forced his body to relax, skin crawling and eyeballs cratered, boots scraping red streaks across the linoleum. The clock was motionless when watched but it had jumped ahead fifteen minutes from the last time he’d let himself check. One fifty-five. 

Twenty-five more minutes, it started to pour and then Dean was free. He was out the double doors and into the rain before he remembered that Sam was staying late, the way he liked to do for no goddamn reason Dean would ever understand. He probably wouldn’t use the weather as an excuse to get into some girl’s car because that was Sammy for you, and he never had a jacket because he went into survival mode south of the Mason-Dixon line, had a hard time when it got above 65 (Dean remembered one July in Louisiana by Sam’s shiny pink glower and the nightly war he waged with the sheets on their motel bed). 

He trailed water back into the lobby, sat down on one of the benches and tipped the secretary his smarmiest grin when she peered out of the office to check on him. The rain soaked cold into his clothes, flush with his skin and chased with fever, waking him up by degrees.

He didn’t see Emily passing by until she said hey and came up to him. He gave himself a pass because his lapse didn’t seem all that critical, and probably felt worse for it.

“What’re you still doing here?” she said to him like it was all a big joke.

“I could ask you the same thing,” he said, giving her that smile before he could check himself. Her laugh trilled with nerves, but she sat next to him anyway, and he was absurdly grateful. Their feet lined up, his boot alongside her tiny strappy sandals and hot pink painted toe nails, and he found himself telling her, “Waiting on my little brother. Sam. He’s, uh, got this thing after school.”

He felt stupid for not being able to remember what Sam had signed up for. The expression on her face was totally foreign, frank but unreadable, made him want to bolt. 

“You always stick around like this?”

“Waiting out the rain, too,” Dean hedged, knowing how he must look. He was on edge, abstractly humiliated, because he was never sure there were ways to explain him and Sam that didn’t say too much. But she wasn’t the kind of girl who’d laugh at him over something like that. “It’s just, um. It’s just the two of us. He’s kinda my responsibility, you know?” 

“Kinda,” she said wryly, flipping the soft fall of her hair down her back so she could slide him a half-moon glance, brown eyes crinkled in the corner. “You got your little brother, I got my man. And he’s got football practice, if it’s not canceled, which it never will be.”

Dean resisted the impulse to tell her that his brother was only thirteen and he’d seen her boyfriend, big guy with raw skin and buzzed blond hair and huge hands, growing out his first beard. Sammy was smart, anyway, he knew how to take care of himself better than that kid ever would.

She seemed to anticipate his line of thought, shot him a reproachful look. He kept himself still and open until she broke off into a tight smile, kind of laughed at herself.

“It probably sounds funny to you, but honestly it’s like the only time we get to spend together anymore is in the car. Senior year is crazy, you know?”

“It doesn’t sound funny to me,” was all he could say.

Because he got that, he really did—could count the ways in long stretches behind the wheel with Dad beside him nodding off one second, jerking awake the next, while Sam bent in and out of the mirror, angling his book into the sunlight, longer stretches sitting shotgun, ganging up on Sammy and playing the loudest, dirtiest tape he could find before his father’s laughter died and he had to turn it down—but he didn’t know. She was probably talking about college applications, sports games and bake sales and school dances and SAT’s, currency that didn’t translate.

The rain thundered on the roof ceaselessly, knocking on the door. Her boyfriend never showed up and Emily left him to it after a while, caught up with a friend who was passing by in a shimmer of blonde hair. Sometime after Dean stopped counting time, gave in and finally closed his eyes, Sam was bound to show up.

 

He spent his first paycheck extravagantly, dragged Sammy along to the grocery store on the far side of town, where the two of them painstakingly picked out the ingredients for spaghetti, Sam combing the aisles like learning braille while Dean tried to be judicious about seasonings. He snagged a six-pack on the way to check out. Sammy vehemently refused to play his son for the cashier, which came down to a lifelong habit of taking his jokes too seriously, like Dean was insane until he proved otherwise.

He sweet-talked the woman at the counter as she rung up their food, Sam a thundercloud at his shoulder. She was brown-eyed and fresh-faced and probably under forty, accent like molasses, and she surprised him, gave as good as she got. Nothing was too outrageous for her.

When she got to the sixer and carded him, Sam got obvious and shot Dean a look that could have put a hole in him. The next thing he knew, he’d turned Sam into a junior Jesus freak who had a thing against alcohol and disapproved of his brother’s drinking, and then they were free, richer six beers and sunshine all around.

“I was so in there, dude,” Dean told him. 

“Whatever, she totally knew that ID was fake,” Sam scoffed, turning scornful eyes on him. “She was having some fun with you, that’s all.”

“You don’t see me complaining about it.” 

His mood was good enough that he didn’t want to test it by arguing with Sam, because they’d started World War III for a lot less. The alcohol weighing him down felt like sun on his face and before he could contain it he smiled at Sam, left himself wide open for a moment.

Sam held his gaze for a while, then snapped his eyes away like he’d been caught at something. His mouth hooked up on one side, wary jagged slant to his shoulders and the delicate furl of his ear flushed red. 

“Can I have one of those?” It was almost cute, how quickly his nerves got the better of him. “Like, later, I mean later.”

“Sammy, Sammy, Sammy,” he drawled, chewing on his name and trying hard not to think about what Dad would say, because Dean had made sure Dad never had anything to say to him, and Sam was different anyway, always different. “Renouncing your faith so soon?”

Sam sniggered in spite of himself, and that was more like it. “Yeah, that’s the other thing, Dean. I’m pretty sure that’s just the Mormons, the rest of ‘em go back and forth.”

“Well, they can do whatever they want if they repent by Sunday,” Dean reasoned, not really interested in finding out how far Sam could take them down this tangent. “You’re not really making your case here, buddy.”

“I shouldn’t even have to,” Sam replied shamelessly. “One beer, and, and you don’t even like drinking by yourself, anyway.”

The front had blown over, no more accidents from Tennessee to New York, but no word from Dad either. 

“Tell you what,” Dean said, unlocking his door and craning to look at Sam across the dashboard instead of over the top of it, because this goddamn van was stupidly big in just about everyway possible. “You let me pick the movie, and we got a deal.”

Sam’s smile was a clean slice of white, so sudden and bright that Dean’s insides twisted up to see it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at him like that.

 

A month later everything had gone to hell.

For one, they were still there. Still in Marv’s house, still going to that school. Dean’s dreams featured a recurring cast of characters, burgers laid out on the griddle like grisly polka dots, peanut gallery of teachers’ eyeballs and Emily asking him things at hyper speed, laughing at him when he couldn’t keep up. Every piece of him screaming to get outside, get to Sam, but Sam was never in the Impala when he’d finally bust out into the blinding sun. His father was nowhere. 

When Dean would break the surface into the nighttime, overheated and sour-mouthed, Middy’s eyes twin moons in the near dark and cars gliding silently across the ceiling, he’d get up and start a new pot of coffee. Then he’d stand over the sink and wait for his heart to shimmy back down his throat.

Fast food lost its mystery so thoroughly that Dean cooked real meals most days (the war with Marv’s kitchen had been epic), and now he was moonlighting as a soccer mom, too, chauffeuring Sam home from meets as twilight stole over the fields, newly shamed by the Aerostar (it was about the only thing he could count on in this dead-end life, but there was no getting around the fact that it was a goddamn minivan). The night inched in on them as the days shortened, treacherous but inevitable shift in the seasons that settled into Dean’s bones like dead weight.

Dean lost time and then perspective, until everything in him told him to run, run before he became one of these dumb kids, just another cog in the machine that Amanda raged against, made her so furious with the cookie cutter American existence she’d carved out on the margins. Useless. Only the night was left to him, the dark and the creeping things he knew were out there, not his birthright like Sam, Sam who didn’t want it, but his inheritance.

He was like a shark or something, had to keep moving or lay down and die, but Sam had always been a natural at downtime between jobs, seemed to thrive on it the longer it dragged on. He always started with small things, hanging onto a horizon of deadlines and test dates instead of the long reach of land and road, but with too much time on his hands he would build a whole life out of scrap parts, the two of them swallowed up in its crooked shadow until the next strong wind blew it down. He stressed over his GPA, voluntarily joined clubs that kept him after school, and made a group of little friends he was smart to keep from Marv’s home, but not smart enough to keep from Dean, mostly because John’s was no man’s land. By his own assessment they were harmless, still giddy with the first taste of teenage freedoms and fascinated with the things their small world could offer. The girls weren’t entirely without potential either. Sam had no chance with the skinny one with sharp pale eyes who didn’t even react to Dean, but the other one, little redhead who might be cute if she lost the glasses, was definitely up for it. Sam never made any kind of move, though, just sat there shooting Dean nervy little glances, chewing on gossip and making plans and pretending this place had something that could keep him.

Dean didn’t have a life, and he certainly didn’t have friends. He had Marv’s forbidden liquor cabinet gnawing at him after sundown, his forgotten stash of tapes in the ten minute intervals it took to get anywhere in this fucking town (music nerd stuff that made Dean’s palms itch—Eno and Kraftwerk and a particularly beat up copy of _Pet Sounds_ ), Emily’s wide smiles to get him through the day and as much of Melissa as he could get, even when the honeymoon faded and they stopped tolerating each other in between fucking around. 

The contours of their days had worn them down into specific patterns, until Dean felt like everything that could happen already had. Training, Marv’s limitless supply of grits for breakfast (Sam liked them runny, which was good because Dean never had the time). Then the long line of authority figures trying to get through their day without getting Dean all over it, apocalyptic teachers, dour lunch ladies, dick gym teacher, one big bone-tired blur without a punch line. Work, dinner, dishes. Stressed slump of Sammy’s shoulders when he got into the car, million mile an hour mouth with beans mashed up in his teeth, stupid action movies from the rental store downtown sometimes and the minute or two he gave himself before he woke Sam up, sometimes not. Deafening silence those times, when Sam lingered dark-eyed on the stairs like he was willing Dean to go off script. But Dean never knew what he wanted, so he stayed behind, came alive with the moon and crashed to earth come sunrise.

Sam terrified him when he got like that. Dean wanted to go his whole life without getting pulled into the reservoir of greed that rose in Sam whenever they stopped moving long enough, but it was impossible to say no to him. It had always been a food-from-his-mouth, blood-from-his-veins and everything in between type deal. When Sam was a baby, it had come down to stuff he could do—pulled faces, diaper changes, improvised lullabies (bitch denied it now)—but somewhere along the way Sam had stopped asking for anything, and now he’d started watching Dean instead.

So for a couple weeks he let himself think he was doing okay, because he had Sam’s secret little smiles at nothing, his dopey contentment when Dean let him sleep in on weekends, the blisters on his feet from all the running he did and half moons under his eyes from studying. Dean could even convince himself from certain angles that he’d put some meat on his bones.

For all that time he’d had his father’s silence too.

Well, not quite. He had one, then two messages from the man. The first one told him he’d killed a shape shifter down in Memphis, an Elvis impersonator and overnight sensation who was simply too good to be true, had a couple leads further south, and might be taking the long way back. By Dad’s burnt black voice, he guessed that the spirit of I-81 had been forgotten at the bottom of a bottle or on the other side of Tennessee, but there were things he just didn’t say unless asked, and Dean was going to ask about that motherfucker. 

The second message came in the second half of October, when the air sharpened and the leaves were mud-colored drifts along the curbs and they’d been there a month and a half. This time he’d just wrapped up a job at a haunted plantation house down in Alabama, simple salt and burn, no story to tell, and Dean actually caught the call.

Words flew up his throat like buckshot and for a couple agonizing moments he couldn’t talk, just clung onto the phone like it was the only thing he had left in the world. His father ran out of things to say in the meantime, minute tops.

“Dean, you getting this?” Dad said into the silence.

His heart started to go again, too fast.

“Yeah. Yeah, I. What about you, Dad, you okay? You’re not hurt or anything, right. Where are you, did you say Tuscaloosa?”

“One question at a time, son,” Dad said, kindly enough that it scraped Dean raw. He focused on breathing instead of the dull heat suffusing his face. “I’m fine. Job was in Tuscaloosa.”

“Alabama, huh,” Dean said to say something. “They chase you out of Tennessee after you killed Elvis?”

Dad grunted, amused. “Your brother there?”

“No,” Dean blurted out, too quick. A glance at the clock told him he had work in fifteen minutes but nothing could move him. “No, sir. You know Sam, he’s a real go-getter. Debate club this time. He’s okay, we’re both doing okay—” 

“Good, that’s good,” Dad said. “You know what to do if something does happen.”

“Right.” Take Sammy and run, regroup at Bobby’s or Pastor Jim’s. Some other person’s home. Dean bit back laughter clouded and bitter tasting at the thought of this town chasing them out. He forged ahead, feeling hideously transparent, “Have you checked in with your friend lately? Guy who owns this place, Marv?”

“He knows how to reach me,” Dad answered shortly, shutting him down point blank. Dean remembered wondering at Marv’s fortunes when he first heard the story and Dad’s sad black eyes boring into him, _I don’t know if you can call it luck, kiddo,_ and, _saw this kind of thing in the war, his legs are done for_. “Where is your head at, boy?”

“Nowhere,” tripped out of him immediately, instinctive denial that sounded crazier the longer it hung in the air, but everything he thought of was worse so he bit his tongue till his mouth rushed with copper. “I’m good, Dad, I swear. Just tired.”

Dean was expecting it this time when his father came back with, “You think this is some kind of vacation?” and rattled off, “No, sir,” fast enough to counterbalance the desperate lurch of his stomach.

Dad sighed harshly down the phone. “Goddammit, Dean, stay sharp. When I’m not around, you have to watch yourself. You get careless, get tired, could mean your life. Your brother’s life.”

“I know that,” Dean said with difficulty. He was glad his dad couldn’t see his bloodless hands and shrinking shoulders because he hated himself enough as it was.

An eternity ground out over a couple seconds, but Dad believed him. Let it go, at least.

“Now, listen. I caught something down in Mobile. Said I’d take care of it as long as I’m in this neck of the woods.” Dad, just a low splintered scratch over the line and a million miles off. “Another couple weeks, then I’m heading up again.”

“When you said you’d take the long way, you sure meant it.”

It was a risk that paid off when Dad chuckled, soft and staticky and not a whole lot nearer. “Yeah, well. Got to go where the road takes you.”

 

Sam did a pretty damn convincing job of not caring about anything their father had to say, just went silent and white-lipped and lived his own goddamn life so ruthlessly that Dean almost hated him for it. He did hate him for suggesting apropos of nothing, days later, that Dad might find something to kill in Mississippi while he was at it, then Louisiana because it was the occult capital of America, left Texas hanging in the air unsaid. It must have shown because Sam’s murky eyes shuttered. 

But his poker face wasn’t brave enough to get past Dean, and sure enough, the words tumbled out in a nervous rush like he’d been caught out, “He, he’s done it before, all I’m saying.”

“Sure, Sammy, that’s great,” Dean said with an awful smile. “Dad can go off into the sunset and, and keep risking his life, while we sit tight in this shithole. And if Marv ever does get out of the hospital, hey, I’m sure he won’t want his house or his fucking cat back.”

“Yeah, I’m having a hard time not seeing the irony here, Dean,” Sam spat out of nowhere. “Like, the part where you didn’t just leave me at Bobby’s and let me think you and Dad were dead for like two weeks, only to show up fucking covered in blood—”

“Come on! That’s the job, that’s completely different,” Dean overrode him heedlessly, frothing gut slowing to a deadly helpless simmer. Sam seemed to short circuit, eyes flaring comically wide and mouth wrenched into a snarl, and Dean floundered to take control of the situation, fight rising in him. “Look, I don’t like it any better than you do, but if Dad leaves your ass somewhere, it’s for your own damn good. You might have seen some things, okay, but you’re still a kid.”

“Why don’t you try listening to yourself sometime,” Sam retorted, but he sounded so tired and shrunk in on himself, nothing like the child Dean had just told him he was. “Do you hate it here that much, Dean? Because I’m not getting where it’s so bad for you.”

“You think playing house is my idea of a good time?” Dean sneered, because he could never tell Sam anything, and Sam flinched visibly. Direct hit.

Sam was determined to hold that against him and Dean couldn’t blame him. Didn’t make things easier though. It was one of his least favorite versions of his brother to begin with, this person who scorned and questioned and picked at Dean until he was stripped down to bare wire and ready to throttle him. With Dad gone, though, Dean became Enemy Number One, and their entire lives got dragged into this thing between them, fair game.

Sam dug through the dusty old pretzel jar loaded with batteries Marv kept in the basement, and revived the kid’s Thunder Cats alarm clock with the last working double A’s. Each morning he came downstairs to confront Dean’s existence on his own terms, eyes disgustedly picking over the coffee grounds slopped in the sink and ghostly stare of Cartoon Network from across the hall. The most Dean could get out of him on the way to school was the twitch in his jaw when he popped off "Autobahn’s" strange, sparse lyrics. At school they became strangers and Sam kept it that way as long as he could, signed up for every club that would take him and stayed out with his friends most nights until the sky purpled and prickled with stars, while Dean stewed in front of the TV, dangerous feeling and cat claws sunk into his heart, until the thing hissed and he heard the snick of the front door and Sam’s heavy footfalls, just under the wire. 

Where Sam couldn’t escape it just festered. He set a ruthless pace on their runs Dean had to kill himself to match, fucking long-legged bitch, but he was useless and sloppy in a fight and he wouldn’t even look at Dean until his back hit the earth, furious tears standing in his eyes. He was sick of everything Dean knew how to make, sick of Dean’s jokes and his guns laid out on the kitchen table and his monopoly over the television. Most of all sick of how he tried to control every last detail of Sam’s life, like he was the one who turned every arbitrary fight over nothing into Armageddon. 

“You ruin fucking everything, Dean,” he raged at him, when he asked for twenty bucks to go to the bookstore with Amy or Andrea (Alyssa?), the one that didn’t have red hair, and Dean just laughed at him, told him he’d be a virgin until the end of time and to try the damn library. And he didn’t talk to Dean for three days when he caught him with the paper over breakfast. Dean wasn’t even doing anything, and whatever Sam thought he wasn’t stupid. He knew there was nothing to kill in this goddamn town by now.

 

Emily asked him during lab, sixth Thursday morning they shared, if he was going to her best friend’s Halloween party on Saturday night. Dean had no idea how he was supposed to answer that.

He had zero interest in going (negative interest if that was possible, because he’d had his fill of Halloween at school, cute little bat cut-outs and chubby ghosts mocking him everywhere he went). It was just the fact that she had asked him, casual until their eyes met over the problem set and she stubbed her toe against the table, glowing red behind the curtain of her hair and insisting that came out totally wrong and everyone was going, except her boyfriend and his friends (hunting trip), and she was just checking with him. 

He got everything he needed out in the backseat of Melissa’s silver Accord during lunch, anyway, taste of her cherry chapstick, fist against his shoulder and hissed curses in his ear when he slipped his hand down her pants, the hard persistent knot in his stomach loosening when she returned the favor. And if it already tightened a bit when he tried to chase the feeling and she slipped a hand over his mouth and pushed him back into the seat impatiently, checking her makeup in the mirror and reconstructing how the rest of her world spent the last half hour, well. Dean had figured out long ago that nothing that felt that good came free.

That was something Sam would never learn. He saw him in the halls sometimes, weighed down with books and hemmed in by people, and laughing, timestamps of how stupidly, fatally happy he was here. He never slipped up at home, because in those rare moments Sam had to look at him and talk to him Dean couldn’t let him get away with it, kept him honest as best he could. He made do with the curl of his lip, lift of his brow, monosyllables and insincerity because there weren’t many things he could bring himself to do to him, found a vicious cut-up kind of vindication that did neither of them any good when Sam’s eyes widened, mouth twisted, knuckles whitened.

He was never the person he wanted to be, in that house, and for the first time in forever, he wanted to be someone else, anybody else. It started over the weekend, the long nothing stretch of the day, as these things usually did.

Dean forgot it was a Saturday, which had come to mean Sam got an extra hour in bed, and hollered up the stairs at six. Stumbling into the kitchen he shot Dean a betrayed look that narrowed into something evil the longer he held his gaze, like he was sure he’d done it to him on purpose. If he’d planned on apologizing that would have convinced him otherwise. He pasted his best sneer on his face and told Sam to stop being such a little bitch. They skipped breakfast.

They came back sweaty and tired, filthy and bruised, bickered over the shower until Dean let him win, let him use up all the hot water and lounged around the garage for hours instead, until the dirt became a second skin. He drank beers too fast, searched for signs of rock ‘n roll on Marv’s faithless transistor radio and waited for the hunger pangs to subside, because for once he wasn’t in the mood to make the six thousand grilled cheese sandwiches they usually consumed for lunch on Saturdays, special treat that had eroded into habit. Dean probably enjoyed it more than Sam anyway.

The kitchen was sterile when he finally gave in and retreated back inside, half past one and no dishes in the sink. On his way up to the bathroom the smooth white plane of Sam’s door greeted him like an accusation, a demonstration of teenage angst that was only as subtle as it was familiar, which was not at all. Dean could probably count on one hand the number of times Sam’d even had a door to shut.

He rapped his knuckles on it, obliquely frustrated with their lives. “Sam, you eat yet?” 

“Do you mind, Dean, kinda busy here,” he heard.

“Yeah, I bet you are,” Dean tried, layering the suggestion on so thick he hoped Sam would burst out to deny it.

Instead there came a crack, probably hardcover hitting hard wood, and Dean imagined him dropping his book in annoyance.

But all that got him was, “Um, I’m not you,” distracted and half-hearted.

“Yeah, well. Guess I never got on a starvation kick over homework.” That was a completely ridiculous thing to say, but his tolerance was waning at record speed. “Dude, you got to eat.”

He left this lowdown lousy feeling at Sam’s door, missed his sarcastic reply over the hiss of water and spent ten fractured minutes away from his brother with his hand on his dick, floating on Melissa’s tits and her glossy dark hair. She gave him Emily’s smile when he came and he didn’t think too hard about that.

By five o’clock he was three or four beers in and out of his skin. Dinner was a disaster. Chili. Forgot to soak the beans, went blind with tears cutting onions and sliced his finger open, metallic taste seeping into his mouth while the hamburger got cooked to death, then stood over the stove red-eyed and wrung out from crying, stomach eating itself while he watched this ruin boil down, until the thick burnt fumes lured Sam down into the kitchen.

“What’s this supposed to be?” he demanded as soon as he saw it, wrinkling his nose. The first thing Sam lost to hunger was his filter, invariably turning into a bratty twelve-year-old girl at the first sign of trouble.

Dean shrugged and dug in, not letting it show on his face when the beans went down like gravel. Sam eyed him for a few seconds, then cautiously followed suit, face falling in such open, helpless disgust that on a better day Dean would have taken it as the best joke, maybe the highest compliment.

Today it didn’t sit well, bitter low flame in his gut. He didn’t trust himself to say anything and to his surprise neither did Sam, just picked his spoon back up and ate, stoic dark head bowed over his bowl. Somehow that made it worse, because his throat closed and each new bite felt like it should have been his last, but he had to keep going as far as Sam took it.

Finally it was over. He saved the leftovers because he couldn’t throw that much food away in good conscience, even though he was probably just giving Marv’s fuzzy pink split pea soup an exciting new friend. He was going to leave the dishes in the sink, let the scummy char scabbing over the bottom of the pot soak while he took a breather, wasted some of the time that had him pinned. The Roseanne rerun might have come on already, and he totally did not care what Sam thought at this point.

Except Sam was still in the rapidly darkening kitchen, lingering out of his eye line while Dean did his thing because he knew better than to get in the way, suffocating him all the same with the awkward bit-off impatience coming off him in waves.

“Out with it, Sam,” Dean said at last, back still turned.

“I, um. I need to talk to you,” Sam said, and then went so still Dean’s neck prickled.

“Okay, so talk,” he replied shortly, not much inclined to do anything of the sort. Didn’t want to look at him, either, so he gave up and started on the dishes after all.

From the way the air changed Dean could read Sam’s annoyance, probably at not having his complete attention. And that was fucking rich, considering he got to pick and choose the days Dean even existed, but whatever. He’d put too much soap in the water and somehow wasn’t prepared to deal with the lofty turrets of foam that resulted.

“There’s this thing I signed up for,” Sam began at last, low and fast like he’d picked his way already and the only thing left was to head Dean off before he could wreck things. “A field trip, you know? Like you do know—”

“Why yes, Sam, I think I’m aware of what a fucking field trip is,” Dean cut in nastily, and if he had any intention of letting this go well for Sam, there it went. “In other news, the sky is blue and the grass is green and _I’m not a fucking idiot_.”

“Did I say that?” Sam countered with a forced, terrible calm. “Look, I know you don’t.” Long pause as Dean made a furious racket banging pots around and Sam searched desperately for words to get him to stop. “You’ve never cared about that stuff, all right? About, about school or any of it. And you know I do, so I’m, I just want you to get where I’m coming from.”

Which, fair enough. He thought maybe he should turn around, but didn’t. His hands weren’t his own, ghostly white until he plunged them back into the water.

“Anyway, it’s like a nature hike up in the mountains? We’re doing part of the Appalachian Trail, that’s all,” he pressed on, almost eagerly, like the name recognition would score him points, but all Dean heard was we. “We go up one day and come down the next—”

“So you’re telling me it’s overnight.”

“—one night, and it’s for science club, and the teacher is like a certified mountaineer, in case you’re worried about.”

Sam stopped abruptly when he rounded on him, and looking at him he was so easy to read Dean might have felt sorry for him, if he had room for things beyond the fire setting his skin alight and the distant roar in his ears.

“Camping, huh. Sounds fun.” He kept his voice light and deadly cool, and threw Sam a serrated smile that bled the color out of his face. “Matter of fact Dad and I just got back from a camping trip, or did you forget that?

Sam rallied almost immediately, mouth set into a long grim line. “Dean—

“Sam, the answer’s no,” Dean told him flatly, finding it strangely easy to ignore what that did to Sam’s face up close.

But Sam had to have known that going in, and sure enough, his choked outrage gave way to a dangerous kind of insistence, “I wasn’t asking you, I’m telling you, okay? It’s on Monday, and I, I’ll be back Tuesday, and no matter what you say I’m going.”

“Like hell you are!”

Sam’s expression didn’t so much as flicker, and Dean wanted to shake him.

“What’s the matter with you? You know what’s out there! For fuck’s sake, Sammy,” he said in total disgust, pacing the length of the kitchen to burn off this crazy, unreasoning fear that Sam had already won somehow. Suddenly it dawned on him: school needed consent, always dodged liability before it did something with your kid. First test of his newfound faith in the system, “Dad’s not here and I’m not signing anything, so you can forget it,” and he mistrusted the words out of his own mouth because when was Sam that easy. 

That drew a laugh like broken glass out of Sam, sure enough. “Don’t worry, I took care of that already.”

“You forged Dad’s signature?” Dean demanded, wholly, cleanly surprised when he probably shouldn’t have been, since Sam had watched him do it a dozen times. It was only for important shit, fake names on hospital release forms when Dad couldn’t hold a pen, real one when he wasn’t around and Sammy needed to get his shots at school. “I taught you real fucking well, didn’t I.”

“Really, Dean, you’re gonna draw the line there?” Sam asked him with a crazy incredulous edge to his voice, like this whole thing was a joke that had stopped being funny a while back. “Yeah, a permission slip, that’s a big deal. In case you forgot, the man runs fucking credit card scams!”

“He does that because he has to, you little shit. You don’t, you’ve never had to do anything.” Dean’s voice was out of his control, shaking and burning up in the atmosphere. “And let me tell you, you’re goddamn lucky I’m the one who has to deal with you, not him. End of fucking discussion.”

He had to get out before he did something, but Sam hung on, yanked him back around by his arm and Dean couldn’t remember when his kid brother’s hands had gotten so large.

“You talk so fucking big,” and Dean got an impression of his snarling mouth, dark flashing eyes before he ripped himself away and Sam stumbled but persisted, “You’re worse than any of my friends’ parents and you’re not even, you’re not Dad.”

A betrayal of the worst kind, uncalculated blow that left Dean staggered and gutshot, and the only weapon he had left was his mouth, “Oh yeah, your friends, that’s cute. They sure know what’s what. I don’t doubt this place turns out some real students of life.”

“You think being normal means you’re automatically stupid or something? Because I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around. Our lives are so fucked up and I, I don’t think you even get that, Dean.” 

Dean had nothing to say to that, and Sam grinned horribly into his silence, pushing hair out his eyes with a jerky flick of his wrist. Few steps away from each other and he barely had to lift his chin to look Dean dead in the eyes.

“It’s not even funny how dumb you are,” he went on mercilessly, almost from helicopter view and voice rising steadily, and this was the last thing in the world Dean felt like hearing. “You almost kill yourself for complete strangers, like all the time. But you don’t care, and it means nothing to you, because all these people we meet who’re just living their safe, average, fuckin’, fucking _happy_ lives? You fucking hate them for it, Dean.”

“What, like that’s part of the job? We can’t just save people, now it’s our business what they do with themselves, when they’re not getting themselves killed?” It was a dangerous question that rose straight from the sepulcher in his chest, along with a whole lot of other things he’d buried too cheaply. “Sorry, kiddo. I might be dumb, but you still got a lot to learn.”

“I swear to God, if you don’t stop treating me like a child,” Sam started to yell.

“Then stop acting like one!” he yelled louder. Laughter ripped up his throat cruelly, and the fact of it made him crazy. “I don’t care about what you care about, so there’s something wrong with me, is that it? You know, I wish to hell I could. Must be nice. It’s too bad that when I was your age I had better things to do than worry about doing my fucking homework, or, or going off to _commune with nature_ with the other kids, fucking fool myself into thinking if something’s fucking normal it must be a good idea. My whole life, you just put your shit off on me, one thing after another, but I never.” Sam opened his mouth, and Dean didn’t know how to stop what he’d started, voice rising furiously to beat Sam to it. “And that’s fine, you get to do that. The things I’ve seen and the things I’ve done, that’s what I get out of it. That’s just how it works. We’re not the same, and you don’t know a goddamn thing about me, or, or anything, Sammy, and we’re going to keep it that way, so why don’t you shut your fucking mouth for once and do what you’re told.”

“You can’t keep saying that to me forever, Dean,” Sam seethed, too quiet. Dean was having a hard time looking away from his face carved newly out of anger, baseline existential kind of fury written into his bones that had probably worn him down for months, maybe years without Dean even realizing. “And you can’t fucking control me. Sooner or later you’re gonna have to let me live my own life.”

“When you start using that big goddamn brain of yours, fine,” Dean shot back, too loud by contrast, watching the hectic rush of color into Sam’s cheeks. “But until then, you’re not going anywhere, and that’s final.” 

“You know what? Watch me.”

Sam’s long legs ate up the kitchen and hallway in a few seconds, and he was jamming his feet into his shoes before Dean could even react. He stood stupidly over him, trip hammer heartbeat and mouth gone dry.

“Sam, where the fuck do you think,” he ground out, but Sam wasn’t giving him any time. The door bounced off the wall when he ripped it open, and suddenly a clean rectangle of dusk was between them, whole world out there, good and bad and nothing they could take back.

Sam shot him one last withering half glance, knocking the breath out of him, and then Dean was left behind, voice splintering, “I won’t come after your sorry ass, you hear me?”

The kitchen was exactly as he’d left it. Splash of tomato on the table, chairs wrenched out like broken wings, tower of dishes in the sink and suds like alien egg sacks flicked across the floor. Lifeless window. Four walls. There was nothing he could do with this post-apocalyptic feeling inside him. He wanted something to kill, blood on his hands, wanted to give up and die, or maybe sleep for weeks and then Sam would be back when he woke up, maybe Dad and the car too, and they could get out.

Instead he went to work on the chili pot, scrubbed until his knuckles were shredded raw and his fingernails were in tatters and got exactly nowhere. It took ten, fifteen fatal minutes for the silence to break him, and then he couldn’t breathe until he had the fresh night air exploding in his lungs, unrelenting pavement like purpose beneath his feet. Sam was long gone, and Dean cursed himself for everything he’d done in the last hour of his life.

The chances of Sam actually getting anywhere were minimal. They were fifty miles from the highway with nothing in between but a confusion of back roads and sprawling farmland, the heart of hillbilly country. But that didn’t remove the possibility that Sam would try something stupid, and the look on his face that second before he was out the door said Dean might drive him to it. 

He put as much distance as he could between him and that thought, miles and miles of sidewalk. By the time night closed in on the town he’d been everywhere Sam knew: school, soccer field, John’s, video store, book store, grocery store, library, finally the field outside of town where they came to spar, lit up in starlight like the Thunderdome. Everything was remade with the darkness, a carnival of the strange and unfamiliar. The thirty-first had come and gone a few days back, brought with it hordes of Disney princesses and witches and would-be ghosts, but the streets still belonged to them. Bright candy wrappers in the wind and in the gutters, pumpkins leering dumbly from porches or detonated orange onto the sidewalk, sugar high corrupting the air, and Dean didn’t trust himself out here. He couldn’t imagine what Sam would look like when he found him.

If he found him. By nine o’clock he’d adjusted, and he started to doubt Sam was even missing, whole body overpowered and numb with rising fury. He was probably holed up with one of his friends, maybe bitching about Dean some more, trying out all the new material he’d just given him. Or maybe he was back home, had been one step ahead all around town and was as tired of playing this game as Dean was. There was nothing here that could have taken him, anyway, except maybe a redneck in an old pick up truck. Dean checked the obits daily now, and Marv had too much history here for that.

Sam wasn’t at home, not that Dean was expecting anything. Steps two at a time, sudden yellow light gouging his eyes out, and he was there. Sam’s room was a casual lived-in mess that ate Dean’s brain with an unexpected wave of violence. It took him about half a minute to find what he was looking for tucked into a library book from six states over and two months back (stolen by degrees like everything they owned): index card with blunted corners and three phone numbers scribbled on it. The avalanche of Sam’s shit onto the floor, crunched pens and soft crush of paper underfoot? Collateral damage.

His hands were shaking too badly to punch in the keys when he got to the phone, and then the first two numbers were useless, went to voicemail. A woman picked up on the last one, surly and suspicious, probably because it was ten thirty at night.

“Hello?”

Dean was a born liar, but everything was fucked up right now and he had no idea what to say. 

“Um, hello ma’am. I, uh. I’m sorry for calling so late. Do you think I could talk to,” and he fumbled with the card, cursed under his breath before he remembered she was on the other end, “Andy for a couple minutes, is she at home?”

“May I ask who’s calling?” the woman said after a painful few seconds, trying to keep her cards close, but he could tell she wasn’t too curious what he might want with her daughter so late. Thank God her husband was too lazy to get out of bed to answer instead.

“Oh, um. We know each other from school, I’m—”

She got bored of him halfway through and hollered for Andy down Dean’s ear. Did it again when there was no immediate answer, and then mercifully a hand came down between them for the exchange of fire between her and her husband. 

“Sorry, kid, she’s not here. Went out earlier.”

“Wait,” quicker than he could think, because if she hung up, “Wait, did she say where she’d be? I just, I really need to talk to her.”

He felt desperate, caught in the lie and torn between slippery, mindless anxiety and blinding rage that this lady had gone so soft she didn’t even know where her own kid was. Maybe if he’d asked her straight, told her his little brother had taken off and he needed to find him, he’d be set. Maybe she would’ve laughed.

More conversation. Then she relayed to him, “Her father says she went out with her friends an hour ago. He doesn’t know where to.”

Dean gritted his teeth. “Did um, did she say who she’d be with? Like, her friend Sam maybe? I’m really sorry to do this to you, I know it’s late and.”

“Who did you say you were again?” she cut in, like he’d somehow, finally, tripped a fucking alarm. 

“We’re working on a history project together,” Dean said, piling on, “It’s due on Monday, and it’s like half our grade. We were supposed to meet at the library earlier but she never showed, so I’m kind of freaking out.”

Seemed like Andy was going to catch hell when she got home, but it was nothing compared to what Dean was going to do to Sam when he got his hands on him. The woman had another screaming match with her husband and told Dean that she’d gone off with her best friend Who-The-Fuck-Cares, and another kid. A dark-haired boy. Tall.

So that was that. Dean tried and failed to be glad that Sam had run off with a couple of thirteen-year-old girls who couldn’t drive and found danger sneaking into R rated movies, or using their parents’ credit cards. Perspective was pretty fucking thin on the ground in this empty stranger’s house, left alone with himself.

It was the same night as the night before, and the night before that, every lizard brained night he’d spent in front of the television, except there was no Sam to kick his shoes across the hallway, hover in the doorway and gloat when he caught him lingering on the soap channel, then stomp upstairs when Dean just changed to C-SPAN because it made no difference to him. No excuse to take his gun for a walk, check the salt lines a hundred times and peer up the stairwell as he went by to see if the light had gone out yet. The difference was Dean could not stand another fucking minute of it, and there was nothing to keep him there.

Came close to explaining how he ended up in another stranger’s house on the other side of town, hostile alien planet filled with teenagers playing dress-up and guzzling crappy beer. No one was fooling anyone. It was stuffy and crowded, manically monotone. The kids were loud and country western hits that much louder, stale atmosphere spoiling for chaos and chasing an ending it was never going to get. Dean had had enough after ten minutes.

He drank determinedly to account for himself and dull the edge. Let the party assimilate him, fetched up among football heroes and small town girls trying to walk the line, class clowns holding court and nobodies who got braver with beer in them, one hysterical cat girl with her cleavage pouring out over the vase she’d broken. When he finally crashed to the couch on the far side of the room, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up again, which was fine because he never wanted to. Girls came and went in a parade of skimpy outfits, and at least that was a dance Dean was used to. He flirted on autopilot and didn’t let on when he realized he didn’t know where the exits were and the world pressed in, goonish and sinister.

Melissa was shopping for real estate amongst the farm boys and that wasn’t so bad, the carrion birds could have him, but then Emily came over to say hello. She was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and he was drunk so he wasn’t going to worry about why that did something for him.

“What are you supposed to be?”

She was laughing at him so Dean laughed too. “I don’t do Halloween.”

“Wow, you’re a lot of fun,” she said from right next to him. Dean missed her sitting down somehow. “We can look stupid together, I guess. I didn’t get the memo and got a real costume.”

“It’s cute enough,” he said, leering at her, before he remembered this was Emily and for some reason it wasn’t okay to leer at her.

But she was smiling, so he got a pass this one time. “You really know how to sweep a girl off her feet, don’t you?”

Dean tried to get it together and promptly failed, distracted by dimples and the supple line of her neck.

“Sweetheart, I know how to do a lot more than that.” It was a bold statement and a sleazy cliché, all comfortable territory for Dean. Not an invitation or anything, but she was looking at him like he’d said something crazy, and only Sam got to look at him like that so he had to fix it. “I just, sake of honesty. That’s all. I say things. A lot that don’t mean. That I don’t mean. Something.” 

“Oh my God, just stop talking.” 

Wrinkling her nose and laughing some more, that beatific sunshiny laugh that shut Dean down, crossed all his wires. He might have been gazing, sinking into the couch under the weight of his look, tried a smile on her. She was pink when she met his eyes. 

“I’m sorry, just how drunk are you?”

“Very,” he admitted, easy under her judgment. “Way I see it, that’s kinda the point to all this.”

“You wanna know something,” she confessed like it was something of huge and deadly portent, “I am, too. It’s hard to get through these things otherwise.”

She’d leaned in like it was just between them, and Dean’s whole world smelled of her. It seemed vitally important that he reassure her, “I won’t tell on you,” hushed and halfway serious. 

Just then the CD started over, cranked out "I’m Outta Here!" for the fourth motherfucking time that night and Dean wanted to blow his brains out.

“And it’s like, I like _Halloween_ , okay?” For some reason she was explaining herself to him now. “Like, it was my favorite holiday growing up. Sue me, I’m a dork.”

“I know somebody like that,” he said. When Sammy came to mind it hurt him physically, but he couldn’t help it now. Too late. 

This time it was that one middle-of-nowhere house from years and years ago (Michigan?). They’d missed two months of school, and the man they’d been left with had spoiled them as best he could to hide how long it’d been since their Dad said he’d be back, but Sam hadn’t had a clue. For him it was two months of the tire swing hanging from the old weeping willow, the driveway that was perfect for sledding when the snows came, same ceiling overhead every morning and sky you could see for miles in every direction. 

The tantrum he’d thrown when they’d left had been epic, and Dean would have said anything to get him to stop. Dad hadn’t used words. But Sam was thirteen and he didn’t do that to Dean anymore. Just hated him instead. 

Suddenly he wanted to explain. 

“Sometimes I just want. I mean if I could just let it be. I never, but it’s just because, reasons. There are always reasons,” he said, struggling, before he decided that Emily’s problem was not life-and-death and tried to forget he’d ever been to Michigan. She was so pretty up close it made him dizzy, and he had to remember to breathe. “You, though, Dorothy suits you just fine.”

“Well, thank you,” she said. She searched his face plainly and he got to watch the blush fade slowly from her skin, and he felt flayed open, hoped to hell she liked what she found. Most people did, but they didn’t look all that hard.

“Why aren’t you,” and he gestured broadly at the room, the din and the amber lamplight, the kids trying to dance in the middle of the crowd, the ones in the corner who’d skipped ahead to making out. The world spun madly in his wake and didn’t stop.

“Because I’m here with you.” She learned fast, Emily did, knew how to make it sound like a joke, too, because Dean didn’t get the wrong idea. “You’re new, so you don’t know, but um. I’ve been to this same party like sixty-five times. It gets old.”

Dean wanted to tell her it was the same everywhere, that American high school was one big bullshit transcontinental assembly line and the only thing that changed was the labels, but he felt like he’d never seen a face quite like hers tonight. And that was an old feeling, too, an old friend.

“Is it always so.” Dumb. Eternal. Skull-busting. There was a bottle of beer in his hand, sweaty slip of glass between his fingers, so he drained it while he remembered. “I need to get out of here.”

It died against his palm, but saying it made it into this thing, overwhelming and exhausting. After a moment or two Emily took his hand away from his eyes and nothing had changed during the time he’d bought, except she was warm and she was wearing a new face, kind that tested gravity and rained grave dirt. “Did you want to go, did you need a ride home or anything?”

“I’m not sure I can get up,” he told her honestly, and that seemed really fucking funny to him. Pucker between her brows Dean wanted to smooth out with his thumb, because he got the idea he’d put it there.

“You know, it’s real quiet upstairs,” she said quietly, all business. “I can ask Carrie, if you want to lie down up there for a while.”

That didn’t take too well, dread thrown over his body like a black tarp. He couldn’t remember why it was a bad idea, though, and nothing was going to trap him ever again.

When she returned they went up the stairs, following the promise of peace and fucking quiet. Once the door shut and his face hit cool linen, the guest room was a different place entirely. She made a show of sighing, first sign he had that she had stayed, and then she was hooking her hand under his shoulder and rolling him onto his side. He didn’t help her but he went. His heart had picked up at the click of the door, and it was running away now, thundering up his throat. 

Then she leaned down and kissed him and it was like he’d crashed headlong into a wall. His eyes were too big in his head and his hands were fisted in the bedspread at his back and his mouth was burning up. She’d kissed him.

He thought that was punctuation, fade to black, but somehow things sped up instead, an unreal blur that took on a painful kind of clarity when he tried to slip his tongue in her mouth, when her leg rasped against his jeans, when she grabbed his hand and murmured, “What did you do to yourself?” and he said he’d lost a fight with the dishes, and she’d giggled and guided him to her breast. 

After that there was no talking. Her face was so close to his it was like one of those Cubist paintings, deconstructed into her nose, hairline, lips, one eye or the other. He couldn’t seem to reach her, though, and everything was happening to him in third person. When she took him in her hand he was hard, and she smiled against his panting mouth, jerking him off like she knew what she was doing, like it shouldn’t hurt at all.

He had some idea it was over too fast, but that wasn’t right, because Dean Winchester always took care of his women. He pushed himself over onto her, and slid his hand down her body, got lost in the folds of her skirt, and.

 

Reality came smashing into Dean’s head like a sledgehammer before he could even get his eyes open. He was alone in the room, and panic surged in him even as he clocked that it was dark outside the window and heard the music thumping down below. Must have fallen asleep. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. But not that much time had passed, maybe an hour or two? When he dragged himself off the bed his stomach swooped fiercely and the floor heaved beneath his feet, and his jeans winged open.

At the foot of the stairs he had to let go of the banister and rely on himself again. He found this Carrie girl with difficulty, because he didn’t know her face and the party had devolved into slurs and stumbles while he was away, braced like interlocked limbs of a couple dozen drunks. It took him two Karens and a Carrie before he found the right one, eyes widening at the sight of him, but she pointed him to the phone right away. It was hidden in plain sight on the hallway table, and he wasn’t sure how he’d missed it, why he’d looked for her first.

The cord wound tight around his knuckles, plastic biting off the blood and leaving them bone white. It took him a minute to remember Marv’s number, too long. Everything he did was off, and it was freaking him out.

“Come on, Sam,” he muttered.

Three rings. Fourth and Dean’s insides vaporized.

The drive home felt like exposition, unnecessary and cruel ascent towards some unthinkable conclusion. Just him and the Aerostar and the night, engine straining impossibly at forty-five, alcohol receding and skull shrinking tight to his brain, leaving no room for thought, or air, just a roaring fog. He was aware of the fact that he’d left all his weapons behind, aware that these were his last few moments and that his dad had seen right through him. Told him it would happen.

Get careless? Get tired? Your brother’s life.

The salt lines were unbroken and he could breathe again. No sign of forced entry, Sam’s shoes! But there was movement in the corner of his eye, between him and the gun he’d left on the coffee table. He went for it without thinking, but when he whipped around he was staring down the barrel at Middy, eyes like gaslight. She bore witness as he threw himself up the stairs and he might have left his body behind, in the numbing fire. And there. The soft snick of the door was an axe hanging over his head, but Sam was there. Sam. He stood and stared for days and days, the dark shape of his brother twisted up in a child’s bed, nothing staring back into him, but when he looked away no time had passed.

It all caught up with him and he slid down Sam’s door, solidifying specter of white at his back. His legs crumpled, cramping viciously, and he was never getting up again.

It wasn’t going to be like this the next time. Next time there wouldn’t be anything to come home to. It might have seemed impossible here, house had no scars, just things that never got done and things that were let go. But it had happened in this room before, just behind that door. Marv had come up here and found something different, and now somehow he was in pieces in a hospital fifty miles and twenty years away. Dean couldn’t comprehend that kind of distance, and he knew right then and there that he was never going to, one way or the other.

 

_He loses his fingernails to tree roots and dirt and if he could move his arms he could reach up and touch outer space, hanging in tatters among the branches, stars like comets and he can’t breathe because his leg is being ripped out of his body, bone-tight grip on his ankle, this body that isn’t his own, slippery and warm and cold and his throat is flayed open screaming for his father._

_When they agreed on this he promised not to scream, promised not to make a goddamn noise because Dad told him on the drive up here, “Wendigo can mimic human voices,” and winked at Dean when he tried not to freak out. If Dad loses them now it’s Dean’s fault, because he can’t stop and there’s no way Dad will know for sure. How could he._

_Faster and faster and there’s a faint pop and Dean’s world detonates, everything stops and he doesn’t know anymore what’s making that noise, him or the thing._

 

When he woke up he didn’t know where he was, Sam’s eyes pinning him in place. He didn’t look away when Dean caught him, intent and unembarrassed in a way that squeezed Dean’s chest like an iron band. He had a million things he could say to Sam, but he wasn’t going to be the first one to talk when it was just as well they didn’t. The television was silent over Sam’s shoulder, muted filmy grey, and Dean could see his face scrolled over it.

“Late night with Dr. Phil, huh,” Sam said at last, ducking his head and rubbing at the back of his neck. “I turned it off myself, so don’t even try to lie. I, uh. I wasn’t going to wake you up, but.”

“I’m up,” Dean said stupidly, not thinking about how long Sam could’ve been standing there. “Just give me a second.”

He stood, no mercy for his joints or his head. His shirt stuck to his back. Stretching earned him a glorious snap of relief that died as quick as it came, leaving him crippled in its wake. 

Sam snuck another glance at him and Dean couldn’t stop staring, eyes like vacuums in his head, so he trooped to the bathroom and threw water on his face, tried to remember where he’d put his keys. Marv’s keys. Then he remembered it was only Sunday, and sank down onto the toilet and thought of nothing at all, waiting for this sick feeling to pass.

“Dude, you dying in there or what?” Sam asked him through the door after enough time had passed, that pissy neutral voice his brother used when he was taking great pains not to start anything. “Did you drink last night?”

“No,” Dean told him, not caring if he believed it.

Sam buzzed under Dean’s skin all day, as omnipresent as the thick, foul thing carpeting his brain, corner of his eye everywhere he went, brooding over some giant book on the stairs, lounging against doorframes with his arms crossed tight over his chest, gnawing on his thumb and pacing. They were talking, but not talking much. The fight hadn’t left Sam yet and it probably never would, an open secret hung out on the crabbed line of his shoulders, but the way Sam kept looking for him was a mystery to Dean. He didn’t like it, because he had nothing left to give away, no punch line, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with him, anyway.

Eventually Dean told him he was going out to get food, worn down to his last nerve. He half expected Sam to follow, to say something when he saw Dean tuck his gun into his waistband, but he just reminded him to get some salt and pepper packets and drifted upstairs at last. He kept quiet when Dean took an hour and a half coming back, too, just studied him narrowly while Dean made himself disgusting with grease and ketchup, and that was how they got through the day.

Dean didn’t sleep at all that night.

He left before Sam’s alarm could ring and went running alone, feeling used up and hemmed in, blue mailboxes and green street signs and finally farmland, spray of gravel underfoot and low sloping fences. If he’d hoped to find some kind of peace out here he was kidding himself. It was just a dull, windless day, and all the open space in the world did him no good. 

He’d consciously brought his gun again, blunt slide of metal at the small of his back. He’d fallen out of the habit too easily, maybe, but it wasn’t like he could take it to school anyway. And if this town was ripe for the first bottom feeding motherfucker that came upon it, Dean figured the hunt would bring them back here someday, maybe soon if Marv didn’t pull through. All this was beyond his control, but his sneaking certainty was an albatross around his neck, left him bitter and antsy.

On the way back, the sun came up like always, and Dean had never welcomed it less. Sam was in the process of getting up, which was like a thirty-minute ritual with him (because Sam was a girl), but his backpack was ready to go. It was stuffed and bulging with crap, dumped at the foot of the stair and sitting in Dean’s stomach like a ton of bricks. This was shit Dean categorically did want to deal with, but it wasn’t like Sam ever left him a choice. 

Dean dug past Sam’s school shit and thick mess of clothes, and found a Snickers bar and bottled water, canister of table salt taped shut, a flashlight, compass, matchbook, rosary and the battered Swiss army knife that Dean had pawned off on him when he was ten. Real fucking survivalist, their Sammy.

After an intense internal struggle he gave up on arming Sam with some real firepower in case this mountain climbing science-teaching fucker had an authoritarian bent. He made do with his Bowie knife, satisfied when he tested it and slit his thumb open. He wrapped it up in Sam’s shirts and then tried very hard to act dumb when Sam came down.

“Why are you bleeding?” Sam said, stopping short behind him as they entered the garage, and Dean hurried over to his side, said, “We’re gonna be late,” and wrenched his door shut. Before Sam could say another word, he punched the tape in blindly and cranked the volume up, and the tinkling barrage of "Wouldn’t It Be Nice" saved him from talking through the car ride.

When he pulled into the school parking lot and killed the engine, Sam was done with him, plain and simple, but suddenly Dean was rooted to the spot, palms slick against the wheel.

“Sam,” he said, before his brother could get away. Took one word and his mouth had gone dry and cottony, stomach in free fall.

“What,” Sam muttered peevishly, before he got a good look at his face and his expression slipped, and then Dean was the one who wanted out. “Hey, what is it?”

It was his own damn fault and Dean had to say something now, anything. He tried to think of what Dad would say, but that man never could tell Sam shit, anyway, so he was on his own. He tightened his hands into fists and concentrated on his breathing.

“Look, I.” False start because his throat was caving in. “I’m not Dad, and I can’t stop you, I know that. But I won’t be there, so I need to know that if things go bad, you’re gonna protect yourself. Don’t play hero or, or anything stupid like that, or I fucking swear I will hunt you down and kill you myself. Okay? Remember what Dad’s taught you.”

“Dean, come on,” Sam began low and scuffed. The turn of his cheek glowed pink, mouth warping into a scowl, but Dean didn’t care, seized his opening.

“Promise me, Sammy. That’s the only way this is gonna work.”

“Okay. Yeah,” Sam said, gentled by his insistence, or maybe by the close, burning air in the car. He’d kind of knocked Sam off balance, like he didn’t know what to say or where to look, and that was a first. “I’ll be fine, Dean.”

 

The morning was a sluggish unreal blur. Whispers and looks seemed to follow him wherever he went, bullshit at high tide that lapped indistinctly at the fog that had settled within him. Dean was in the process of losing it. His reason was stripped to its raw, sightless underbelly and his nerves were fried, tripped in random portentous bursts that rattled him to the core. He concentrated on the things he could deal with, the new seam in his thumb, hard cold seat under his ass, his teacher’s tits beneath her sweater, anything to get him back in his own body. He kept thinking that his only reason for being here at all was to drop Sam off and bring him home.

They had a test in English. He hadn’t been sleeping, in class or otherwise, so for once he had a basic grasp of what was going on, but he also wasn’t Sam. The questions seemed like tricks, stuff he was too stupid to understand, so he spent the period wrestling with them to avoid thinking, just trying to break through.

Lunchtime should have been a relief. The food was uniformly terrible but it was food, and that was pretty much the whole ballgame for Dean. More to the point, usually it meant a whole forty minutes free of this life’s expectations, unless Melissa needed to blow off some steam, which was a burden Dean was happy to bear. Today he was having trouble getting anything down, left alone with himself and all the things that were eating him up inside. Snatches of Dad’s journal, ruthless encyclopedic run-down of all the things they’d hunted in Appalachia, all the leads they’d chased up and down those mountains, missing Boy Scout troops and dead hikers and torn-up campsites. All of that so he didn’t keep going back to Minnesota, how furious Sam had been to have been left behind again, and how stupid Dean was, thinking he could to take it to the grave, all the things his little brother thought he was missing.

It was almost welcome when the three-headed shadow fell over his table. He’d picked out a couple overgrown jock types heading in his general direction, but it didn’t really compute that they were coming for him until they were already there, crowding in and giving him hard looks.

“What can I do for you boys?” he said, keeping his tone even.

The ruddy blond in the middle went red, or redder, and Dean’s stomach stirred sickly with recognition. Emily’s boyfriend, hunter and football player extraordinaire. He’d done nothing but fuck up since that last hunt, two days ago he’d managed to set new lows for himself on pretty much every level, and now he couldn’t bring himself to care, which was probably worse than any of it.

The boyfriend couldn’t seem to get words out, so his friend took over.

“Cool party on Saturday, huh?” he said, like he was being clever or something, beating around the bush, and of all the things Dean did not need right now.

“If you say so,” he replied, took an obnoxiously giant bite of instant mashed potatoes to keep that awful shit-eating smirk off his face, and it went to sand on his tongue.

“Hey, dipshit—” the guy said, and it looked like Dean had started something after all, when the boyfriend cut him off suddenly.

“I know what happened,” he said, shaking with forced calm, and Dean’s mouth was bone dry, “I don’t need to hear it from you, okay? She, Emily. She told me everything.”

“She didn’t do anything,” Dean lied automatically, idiotically, before he could even think, and that earned him a blow that threw him out of his chair, sudden thunderclap of silence across the cafeteria before the white noise rushed in louder, hive pressed in around them. His mind was an echoing blank and the blooming pain in his face tasted like relief. He got to his feet, wiped blood off his lip, was ready when the next one came.

The two friends were like child’s play, big and dumb and useless on their own, but there were still three of them. The kid himself had seventy pounds on him, and was fueled by a red veil of rage Dean couldn’t match. Got ahold of Dean’s collar and pummeled him until he was dizzy, having a hard time staying on his feet, and it totally wasn’t funny, but once Sam learned that Dean got jumped by a couple of farm boys, he was going to laugh his ass off. In between punches the guy kept telling him, “Shut up about her,” and, “You think I don’t fucking know,” and, “Wipe that smile off your face, you fucking freak.”

It took a couple teachers to peal him off of Dean, another couple to yell at them for using fists instead of words and tut over the mess they’d made and herd them to the office, couple more to swallow the load of shit the other two were selling while Dean and the guy sat side by side and let them do it, breathing hard and not talking. The principal capped off the whole performance by suspending the four of them, sweating through his dress shirt behind his massive desk. Dean got a whole week, about twice as much as the rest of them, which seemed unfair by any normal reckoning, but Dean was ready to be done and didn’t care.

Of course the principal wasn’t going to let him go that easy, held him back after the rest had trickled out to the secretary’s office to call their parents, get their stuff. He was determined to get Dean’s father in here, or on the phone, or something. He thought of the last time he’d talked to him, _got to go where the road takes you_ , and something was wrong with him because he just wanted to laugh again. When Dean told him on no uncertain terms, as many ways as the man needed to hear it, that it wasn’t going to happen, his semi-permanent sneer wavered and his dark eyes lit with genuine pity. 

“Don’t think you won something because I’m letting this go, son,” he remonstrated, considered him for one long moment before he sighed and his shoulders shifted, loosened. “You’re old enough to take responsibility for yourself, so start using your head, you hear? Start thinking about your future now, or you won’t have much of one. Not here, leastways.”

And somehow that hit Dean harder than anything had all day, made him feel like trash, just a dumb kid with nothing to say for Dad or for himself, disloyal and useless. Abandoned to this system and left to rot by its rules.

By the time he got out to the van it was getting pretty difficult to ignore the fact that he’d been beaten to shit. One eye was rapidly swelling shut and his ribs might’ve been bruised, because breathing took too much out of him. Easing inside, he suddenly missed the Impala like crazy, no real reason for it. Then it seized hold, this idea that he’d barely lived through half the day, that the night was still ahead, and he was suddenly too tired to move. He closed his eyes, took a few.

 

The passenger door jerked open and there was Sam, throwing his enormous backpack into the back. It caused a minor earthquake upon impact, jarring the stiff line of Dean’s body and subtly rearranging his skeleton. Dean was pretty sure he was dreaming, because Sam was here and not up in the mountains getting ripped apart by Dean’s worst fears.

He squeezed his eyes shut and played possum, ignored it when Sam’s voice told him to stop acting stupid, it was too hot to pass for November and he wanted to get out of here. The jig was up when Sam leaned in and got a closer look at him, sharp hiss of breath before Sam shoved his shoulder and Dean recoiled against the slingshotting pain in his side, snapping fully awake.

“Jesus, Dean, what the hell happened?” Sam demanded, like he wasn’t making things ten times worse himself, and Dean got an eyeful and a half of Sam’s face, just barely registering the sharpness in his voice and fierce weave of his brows. The simple fact of Sam crushed in on his brain too bright to look at closely, and he held onto the steering wheel for dear life, waiting for it to pass, for things to be normal again.

“Ah, I had it coming,” Dean said when he could talk, because it didn’t matter, and his brother just gawked at him, that gloriously characteristic Dean-is-nuts look. He was smiling, and it hurt something awful. And more importantly: “What’re you doing here?”

Sam just sighed and shook his head, snatching assessing glances at him as he yanked his seatbelt on and hitched his knee up against the dash. This was the second time Sam had caught him out in as many days. He just let him look. 

Eventually he got a clue and started the car, steered them out of the parking lot with shaking hands that steadied as he drove. Things started to feel more real when they got the school behind them and hit the streets. The sun had come out sometime while he slept, and the crisp, clear day bore no relation to its muddled dawn. He cranked down his window and Sam followed suit. They hit every red light and Dean didn’t even care.

“Dude, you put a knife in my backpack.”

Punch of surprise. “What?”

“A knife, Dean,” Sam repeated, and it took a couple seconds for him to catch up. Sam didn’t sound mad, more like he was trying hard not to smile. In fact he was taking it a whole lot better than Dean might have expected, if he’d thought about it at all.

“Yeah, I figured a gun might be more trouble than it was worth,” he said, and when Sam blew air out between his teeth, he took more interest. Clapped him on the knee and beamed at him, hiding his wince. “Best defense is a good offense, Sammy.” 

“Uh huh. Says the guy who looks like he went a couple rounds with a brick wall.”

“Hey, I gave as good as I got,” Dean protested, mostly by rote.

“Whatever.” 

Sam’s hunched shoulders and the stubborn turn of his head told Dean he was over it, this holding pattern they’d been in ever since Sam was old enough to talk—Sam waiting for Dean to come clean on his own, which never happened, then needling him into it, which worked by degrees and only when he kept at it long enough.

“I, uh. Went to this thing that night. I tracked you down, and then, I don’t know. Just needed to get out, I guess,” Dean volunteered, surprising himself, but he was breathing fresh air and he wanted to keep it that way. He didn’t have to look at Sam to know he was listening. “Anyway, I got wasted and fucked this girl I shouldn’t have, and this is what I have to show for it.”

Sam got the gist pretty quick and laid down his verdict, “Wow, you really suck, Dean,” and of course he was enjoying this, the twerp. The funny thing was, Dean was too.

“I’d tell you to learn from my mistakes, Sammy, but I don’t think you’re in danger of repeating them.” 

“Har de har,” Sam said dully, rolling his eyes so hard he might’ve sprained something, before he sniggered in spite of himself. “You got my friend in deep shit with her parents, too. They totally think she’s failing history now.”

That was the thing with Sam. Give him an inch and he’d take a mile, and set up camp there besides. Somehow Dean was never prepared for that, never went in with a plan or a way out. 

“Tell me where you’re going next time, problem solved,” he said, and immediately regretted it, tensing up and training blind eyes on the road. Sam was staring out the window again. “You wanna go to a movie or something? Maybe we could try that Chinese place.” 

He’d deliberately missed their street a while back and pushed the town limits when Sam didn’t say anything, but maybe that had been a mistake.

“Dean—”

“Let’s not, Sam,” Dean cut in, because he didn’t want to close the loop and work their way around this same conversation, let things spiral when they were starting to normalize. “Water under the bridge. Talking just makes it worse.”

“Since when have we ever talked about anything?” Sam scoffed in a low simmer of frustration, and when Dean didn’t answer he sighed explosively. “Case in point.”

Sam wasn’t picking a fight, not quite, but it was close enough that Dean could hardly tell the difference anymore. “I’m really trying here, Sam,” was all he could think to say, seemed so close to pleading he cringed to hear it. Should have bit his fucking tongue because then he overshot trying to fix it, “If there’s something you want me to say—”

“Okay, sure,” Sam replied before he could finish getting the words out. He was nervous, which was never good. “What happened in Minnesota, Dean?”

“What?”

Playing for time, playing dumb, something, while everything he thought he’d left behind that morning came rushing back with a vengeance. He hung everything on the straight black line of the road and waited to break the surface again.

“You heard me,” Sam said, steady by contrast, as if they had to balance each other out.

“No, I mean. What is there to talk about? It went down like it always does, just took longer,” Dean said after a beat, worrying the inside of his cheek viciously, bad habit that snuck up on him sometimes. “You want the gory details, or something?”

“Look. You don’t want to talk to me, fine. But it’s getting to the point where there’s obviously something really fucking wrong, and it’s obviously not going to go away, okay? Dad just took off, and he’s not coming back, and you—you just sit around and watch TV all day, you don’t care about anything—”

“Fucking news at ten: Dad’s never around, and I’ve got nothing better to do!”

“When was the last time you slept, Dean?” When Dean opened his mouth in protest Sam’s face soured, like the irony tasted too foul for words. “And I mean, like, eight hours or more.”

“I sleep,” Dean lied gamely, not sure why he’d chosen to make this a point of contention. Maybe it was the look on Sam’s face that morning when Dean woke up, which was starting to resemble pity with the increasingly disproportionate benefit of hindsight. Like he’d seen right through him.

“No, you don’t,” Sam snapped, worked up beyond distraction, and he was starting to scare Dean. “You don’t sleep and you don’t talk, and all we do is fight about things that don’t even matter, and do you have any idea how much it fucking sucks, man. Because I never know what is going on.”

“Sam, hey. It’s okay, it’s okay,” and he didn’t know what he was saying, watching his brother instead of the road. He made the decision, pulled over onto the dirt shoulder and stopped the car. When he reached for his shoulder Sam jerked away furiously, “Would you fucking stop,” and the movement lodged obliquely in Dean’s chest, less room to breathe. Then Sam rounded on him, high surge of color and apocalyptic eyes.

“You’re gonna fucking tell me,” he said grimly, voice hectic and strange, and this time when Dean reached for him he submitted, scrubbing a rough hand over his face and releasing a thin, rattling sigh like an old man. His shoulder was shaking under his hand, and Dean was trying really hard not to push.

Things had been bad for so long now, but Dean was officially at the end of his rope. He felt cornered, bitter and evasive and irrationally, betrayed. This whole thing with Sam, the fighting and the silence and the truces in bad faith, the way they’d head in opposite directions without letting go of anything first, the things Sam wanted from him that Dean had never wanted to show anyone…it was too much for Dean to deal with on his own. He had one moment where he missed his dad with every molecule in his body, and then he gave in.

“Okay,” he said, and, “Sam,” and, “I didn’t know.”

The story formed as he went, memories of memories cobbled together and refracted through the dusty daylight: Wendigo outlasted them, stalked their camp, starved them out. Got so bad Dean played bait, waited for forever in the shadowy trees outside their circle of salt and runes. Hours and hours for a fraction of a second window, and they were off. Later he’d learned that Dad had been this close, fried it on one side, slowed it down and pissed it off, and that he’d chased the trail of destruction and stench of burning flesh through the trees. And that was it, the day where Dean started to go wrong. 

He wasn’t sure which parts Sam was looking to hear, the things he said or the things he couldn’t, the hunger and the fear and the crazy-making boredom that set in after a week, the day and a half it took to convince his father he was up to it, and that the longer it took the less sure of it he was. How it terrified him to think his father couldn’t trust him anymore, that in spite of everything, it wasn’t the smell but Dean’s voice Dad had gone after, or that he’d been a dead man for a little while and he was having a hard time going back from that. Didn’t mention his father’s bloodless face as he leaned over him to check his vitals, eyes wide open and fearful, Dean’s whole world, or the fact that they’d been running ever since, and Dad had run all the way to Louisiana, and neither of them knew for sure if the hiker they’d left for dead could’ve been saved, maybe strung up and kept alive in that thing’s larder.

And he hoped to hell Sam could salvage something amidst his spilled guts, because he was not going to ask, because he could’ve gone his whole life without this moment, because he was planning on spending the rest of it pretending it never happened. 

 

Dean liked to think it wasn’t the talk, but the mind-numbing boredom it preceded that brought him around. School was just a holding pen as far as he was concerned, but turn him loose and it was a swift, blind descent. That was just the kind of person he was.

That first night he called work and hacked piteously into the phone, so obvious he had Sam thumping his arm to shut him up, features curdling in secondhand embarrassment. Amanda didn’t buy it, but she didn’t exactly care, either, so he hung up and then ordered a pizza and hot wings. He and Sam ate like kings, and then he broke out Marv’s whisky and drank until he couldn’t stand on his own. Sam had dragged him bodily up the stairs in the end, and Dean hadn’t known what the world had come to, how much more he would have to let Sam change from the kid he’d been. Seemed like he’d grown since they got here.

When he came to it was in Marv’s bed, first light peaking in through the yellowing blinds. Panic seized him, and he spent the next few minutes just laying there, staring into the near dark and struggling for control over his own body. Eventually he forced his way to his feet and got himself to the bathroom, falling through the plastic sheet stapled in Marv’s doorway and banging off the walls in the hallway. He heaved himself onto the toilet and pissed with his aching head in his hands, trading his dignity for release.

He was on his third cup of coffee when Sam came down, yawning and scratching his stomach, up unaccountably early.

“Coffee,” he said sleepily.

That technically was open to interpretation, but Dean charitably took it as a request instead of an observation. The last couple of months he’d had his fill of Sam’s thoughts on the subject—how coffee was a common performance enhancer but then it was often spiked, and it actually dehydrated people, how Dean’s coffee grounds were disgusting and would clog the sink, blah blah blah, when all Dean wanted was to enjoy his goddamn caffeine in peace. 

He snagged an I Heart NY mug from Marv’s cabinet (he had a whole collection, probably souvenirs from hunts, which, well, Dean had seen stranger things), went to get the milk out of the fridge, because Sam couldn’t take it black, but his brother waved him off, and hid his grimaces behind the rim.

Sam didn’t get chatty until they were pulling their shoes on and Dean had to take a pause when he bent over to fix his laces. 

“You’re not looking so good, Dean,” he said cheerfully, and Dean might murder him after all. “Should probably stop getting shitfaced all the time before it becomes a habit.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Dean thought he was doing a pretty good impression of someone who didn’t have a hot iron shoved between his ribs, and wasn’t about to hurl. He stood and shouldered his way through the door. “See if I go easy on you now, Samantha.”

“You just worry about keeping up. I still have school, I wasn’t stupid enough to get myself suspended.” 

Normally Dean wouldn’t tolerate that kind of sass, but Sam kept shooting him these secret little smiles when Dean wasn’t supposed to be looking, disarming him. He didn’t say anything.

Then the run got his blood up, wheezing and sweating through his shirt, trying to get his body to function and contending with the nauseating, hateful slurry Sam’s back kicked up in his stomach.

They went the full distance, and didn’t spar at all, because the minute Dean stopped moving it all caught up with him and he spent the next couple of minutes puking his guts out on the roadside. Rather than leave him to his misery, Sam squatted down beside him and patted his back softly, ghost at his shoulder.

Afterwards they just threw themselves on the grass and watched the clouds and each other. Dean drove himself mad, chewing on the possibility that _Sammy_ would have gone easy on him, that motherfucker.

“I hope we go north next,” Sam said to the great open sky. “No more of this 40 degree day bullshit, seasons that don’t mean anything. I want a real winter.”

“Suppose there are things that need killing most anywhere you choose to look,” Dean replied, as much of an answer as he could give. He never held talk like this cheap, because he knew how much it meant to Sam, how little it meant to their father.

Sam made an impatient noise, cut off low in his throat, and nudged him gently. “What about you, where would you go?”

The surprise cleaned him out, because it was this unspoken family rule, that if he had to get Sam in line and fight Dad on the little things, nobody asked him to get in the middle. All Dean knew was he’d wanted out of every place they’d ever been, longed for the road and the spaces in between more than anything. 

But he thought of blue skies and wide open horizons and found himself saying, “Out west, maybe. The desert.”


End file.
